Christopher Robin’s Dartmouth bookshop to close

The independent bookshop founded by the real-life Christopher Robin from
Winnie the Pooh is to close later this month.

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Christopher Robin in an identical scene from Winnie the Pooh

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AA Milne, with his son Christopher Robin and PoohPhoto: HULTON/GETTY

1:18PM BST 20 Sep 2011

Harbour Bookshop, a bookshop once owned by AA Milne’s son Christopher Robin, is to close at the end of September, due to falling profits.

Immortalised by his father in the beautifully illustrated ‘Winnie the Pooh’ children’s books, Christopher Robin Milne founded the bookshop in Devon with his wife in 1951.

The town’s only independent bookshop was regularly visited by Winnie the Pooh fans who wanted to meet the original Christopher Robin, but Milne would often hide from them, preferring not to talk about his fictional alter ego.

Milne came to resent his father's use of him as a boy in his books: "It seemed to me almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with the empty fame of being his son." This story was one of the influences of a series of Vertigo comic series called The Unwritten.

He and his wife ran the bookshop until he retired in 1983 and Milne subsequently passed away in 1996. The bookshop is now run by Rowland and Caroline Abram, who blamed rising rents and increased competition from online outlets.